Resistance to Oligarchy in the American Revolution

Marking Tom Paine's birthday

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in what is now the United States. With it came the launch of an armed revolution against distant fascist leaders and a struggle between true reformers and reactionaries who would ultimately lead the budding nation further down the path of imperialism, slavery, land theft, and elite domination.

Today, the U.S. government is using the 250th anniversary as an opportunity to peddle facile propaganda in service of nationalistic fascism. As a law firm which has been educating communities about the truth of U.S. “freedoms” for thirty years, we’re here to set the record straight.

Welcome to CELDF’s America 250: A Revolutionary Perspective, an ongoing series this year.

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In December of 1774, Thomas Paine, a radical anti-monarchist Englishman of common stock, came to America. His father was a corset maker and expected his son to take up a trade. But Paine had bigger plans that would lead him to the American colonies, and then to revolutionary France.

He arrived in Pennsylvania with a letter of introduction signed by Benjamin Franklin and soon had a position as editor with Pennsylvania Magazine. All around the city and up and down the seaboard colonists had grown agitated over the way the Crown government treated them as second-class. Were they not British citizens? Should giant corporations like the East-India Company be bailed-out financially by raising taxes on colonists and removing the burden from the corporation? Is that how a government that pretends to care about its people behaves?

Discontent with governance from across the Atlantic was growing, but most colonists carried on and made the best of it, never imagining they’d fall in with radicals like Sam Adams in Massachusetts (yes, the beer is named after him), and Alexander McDougal of New York. But they hadn’t yet heard from Tom Paine.

Paine was excited by the biting rhetoric of the Sons of Liberty who were actively lampooning the corruption of government by the giant corporations. He saw these mini empires as chips off the old block of the monarchy that chartered them. And he lampooned the very notion of chartering corporations as the elevation of charter-holders above the community of men. He reveled in stories of blistering broadsides being posted and read in public places throughout the colonies. He knew about the East-India Company’s tea being dumped into Boston Harbor. A similar act of resistance against modern corporations might see shipping containers consigned to the deep.

Less than two years after his arrival, Paine published Common Sense, a sharp critique of the monarchy that decimated the idea of social class, aristocracy, and hereditary rights. He saw nothing natural in the belief that society is hierarchical. He instead advocated for its replacement with a system that values equality among all people, no kings, no privileges, only an egalitarian birthright shared by everyone. He wrote that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again,” and he persuaded fence-sitters in the colonies to join the cause for revolution and independence from the British empire. His words had a mesmerizing effect on colonial yeomen that neither the Congress nor General George Washington could evoke.

Common Sense was an anomaly for its time. It sold like hotcakes and would have been a New York Times bestseller if it had the same success today. It became the topic of discussion everywhere and copies were shared widely. Excerpts of the fiery manifesto of liberty were published in the Carolina newspapers. Even Washington ordered that Paine’s radical writings against centralized tyrannical government be circulated among the colonies to rally farmers and commoners to the cause.

It can be said without doubt, as did John Adams, that “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” But Adams was also fearful of Paine’s unyielding opposition to top-down government. While acknowledging Paine’s meteoric rise to fame in America, he called the firebrand a “disastrous meteor” who might ruin the diplomatic efforts of the Continental Congress. And Paine was not shy about his disdain for the likes of Adams and the rest of the Federalists who eventually stole the revolution for their own pecuniary and political purposes. Among those men were Washington, Madison, Hamilton, and Jay. They were envious to harness the power of the independent states, and to rein-in their very independence, which interfered with Federalist commercial plans to extract resources and ship them across sovereign borders without begging permission of each state.

Now, you may be forgiven if you don’t know much about Tom Paine. Unlike Thomas Jefferson, who gets credit for writing the Declaration of Independence that Paine inspired, and unlike George Washington, who became rich in land by cheating soldiers under his command after he persuaded them that the land grants promised in payment for their military service would not be honored, and unlike James Madison, architect of the counter-revolutionary U.S. Constitution, Thomas Paine is not celebrated today as one of the well-known members of the pantheon of so-called “founding fathers.” They, each of them, unlike Paine, also claimed ownership of hundreds of enslaved human beings. Unlike Paine, they believed “the opulent minority” (Madison’s term) deserved to govern, not the majority.

There are no federally sanctioned monuments to Paine in Washington D.C., although plans to erect a memorial on the national mall were approved by the Biden administration. If not cancelled by the current regime, completion is anticipated in 2030.

During the second “red scare” McCarthy years (1950-1954), Paine’s collected works were censored and removed from schools and libraries. Biographies and novels about his life were also banned. These disrespectful exhibitions of elite spite against a commoner of unwavering convictions fails to diminish his voice as it’s carried down the years and into the hearts of subsequent generations. He needs no monument, as do the small men on pedestals throughout the halls of official power. He is head and shoulders above them as a champion of democracy and human rights.

Today, January 29th, is the birthday of Thomas Paine, or maybe it’s February 9th; there is some dispute over that and his birth year, which was 1736 or 1737. But there is no debate that he was the inspiration for the Declaration of Independence, the motivator of the revolt against the British empire, and the true founding father of American independence from Britain. This year we celebrate Tom Paine who 250 years ago initiated a rebellion against tyranny. The American government that rules us today was not created until 13 years later, in 1789. We‘ll see if that gets a 250th celebration in 2039.

To the dogs in the manger who’ve silenced Tom Paine’s voice and called themselves the founders, and to those who keep those lies alive today we say: scurry roaches! The light of truth is upon you.